Month: January 2024

Where should I start? If Tompkins County’s policies are not lies: they are certainly fraudulent. Policy making is a jenga of misrepresentations: whose cunningly shaped pieces are glued together with power, cronyism, and corruption – to prevent the removal of any piece and threaten their collapse. There is no meaningful participation by the people – just the assertion that there is.

The County’s policies are released with the trumpeting of a royal proclamation – and a “take it, or leave it, but there’s nothing you can do about it” arrogance. The smugness of plans well laid by superior intellects.

In this college controlled fiefdom; there are many strata – and the lowest is occupied by the rural poor. We are treated like the tenants of the Irish Landlords: disposable goods. And when you’re disposable — you can’t be a victim.

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This is a good place to recap the four step defense of politicians, bureaucrats and criminals: 1) Discredit the source, 2) Discredit the facts, 3) Discredit the situation, 4) “It’s legal.”

Their quibbling is frequently not with any intent to correct or clarify – but to avoid the issue. If they make the questioning too difficult: they hope you will give up.

It’s not surprising that a world-class university and the uber-powerful Agricultural lobby can combine to thoroughly crush the most marginalized and unrepresented sector of New York’s population – it’s also not surprising that no one is willing to speak up for us.

Abraham Lincoln said: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

Empowered by 30,000 blissfully ignorant students, with a four-year memory and a six-figure future: Cornell University has led an overwhelmingly Progressive policy front to steamroller any resistance from the neighboring municipalities in a rural county of only 105,000.

Our CAFO run rural “government” – whose lead planner publicly stated that no one but farmers “deserved to live there” – helped create the County’s most recent “vision of the future”: in which the rural communities no longer exist.

With policy making that has closer ties to the Khmer Rouge than Martin Luther King, Jr. – Tompkins County is a college destination with the sort of moral compass that lands people a spot on American Greed.

What is the Secret Cornell?

Something that makes the College Admissions Scandal seem like throat-clearing at a political rally.

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It’s common for the lesser to be described in terms of the greater. We are the oppressed of Cornell.

Like so many lands around a dictator’s domain; we are seen as a territory to annex and remake: a colonial outpost to settle, a resource to use, and a place to dump all the unwanted and unsupportable. And, like so often in history – an existing people to dispose of. It’s a story of arrogance and oppression that is both untold and unreported.

Cornell is remolding Tompkins County: and some of us are just excess material.